Special report: Shrinking water's hidden footprint

Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido has taken extensive measures to reduce its water use, but beer -- like almost all products -- still has a "water footprint" far bigger than most people realize.
— Peggy Peattie

Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido has taken extensive measures to reduce its water use, but beer -- like almost all products -- still has a "water footprint" far bigger than most people realize.
— Peggy Peattie

When patrons pull into Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, they drink beers that some say are among the best in the country. But few ponder that each sip is at the end of a virtual stream of water that trails all the way to hop farms in the Pacific Northwest and barley growers in Canada.

It can take about 40 gallons of water to produce a pint of beer, according to analysts who specialize in emerging efforts to track hidden water flows around the world.

Step back through the beer-making process and it becomes clear that water is used all along the way — in farming, shipping and brewing. That doesn’t surprise Stone Brewing, which has a reputation for being green and has aggressively trimmed demand for imported water.

Tapped out

Because of a huge snowpack two winters ago, California has plenty of water to last through this summer. But the long-term trend is clear: Across the arid West, people have over tapped the water sources. U-T environment reporter Mike Lee explores the region’s water supplies, prices and consumption in a series of special in-depth reports.

“The Colorado River is completely dried up by the time it reaches the Gulf of California. We really have no water here, yet we are in a water-intensive business,” said Bill Sherwood, a company official in charge of water treatment.

And it’s not just beer. Almost every product has an invisible impact on water resources, which are increasingly strained in the arid West due to drought and population growth. The emerging concept is known as the “water footprint,” similar to the carbon footprint that blossomed in recent years because of efforts to trim greenhouse gas emissions that are the hidden result of everyday activities such as driving and turning on the lights.

Water footprints are gaining attention in California and abroad as cutting-edge consumers seek low-water products and companies jump onboard to limit their ecological impact and curb negative publicity.

“There is water embedded in our electricity. There is water embedded in our coffee and our clothes. I think people forget that,” said Heather Cooley, a researcher at the nonprofit Pacific Institute in Oakland. “They think about it when watering their lawns and turning on their taps — direct uses of water — but they are not really considering how it’s being used in everything that they consume.”

Models show that each person in the United States is responsible for about 2,000 gallons of water each day in the food they eat, the products they buy and the fuel they burn. Roughly half of that water budget supports the American diet, which is heavy in water-intensive products, such as meat and dairy.

The result is that the per capita water footprint in the United States is about twice the global average, contributing to the nation’s well-documented drain on natural resources.

The water footprint isn’t a perfectly parallel concept to the carbon footprint; for one thing, water is a reusable resource not a pollutant. Also, it’s rarely calculated — let alone publicized — so consumers could find it frustrating to try to shrink their share.

Still, implications of water-footprint thinking could be significant for the Southwest, where demand for water outstrips supply and the prospects for a long-term drought threaten to make the situation worse. The San Diego region has enough water for its current needs, but water managers are nervously eyeing low flows on the Colorado River as they consider expensive investments such as desalination plants and new ways to help customers do more with less water.

“Ten years ago to 15 years ago, you wouldn’t have heard people talking about their carbon footprint. Now, you hear it all the time,” said Ann Tartre at the Equinox Center, a sustainability research group in Encinitas. “I do think (the concept) has potential … to help people realize how their everyday decisions are affecting water consumption.”

The water footprint

Brook Sarson has worked harder than most San Diegans to trim her water consumption. She irrigates her small yard off El Cajon Boulevard almost entirely without tapping fresh water from hundreds of miles away. Instead, she harvests rainwater and recycles “gray water” from the kitchen sink, shower and washing machine so that most of the time she has more than enough to keep things green.

By building simple recycling systems — mostly PVC pipes and valves — and replacing grass with other plants, she figures her family slashed direct water use from about 60 gallons per person per day to about 30 gallons per person per day — far less than the regional average.

How much water everyday items and activities use

Brushing teeth: 1 gallon

Flushing toilet: 2 gallons

Running dishwasher: 4 gallons

Eight-ounce cup of tea: 8 gallons

One slice of bread: 11 gallons

One apple: 18 gallons

Showering for 10 minutes: 20 gallons

Running clothes washer: 25 gallons

One pint of beer: 40 gallons

Washing car: 50 gallons

One egg: 53 gallons

One pound of potatoes: 119 gallons

1.5-ounce chocolate bar: 297 gallons

One pound of chicken: 468 gallons

One cotton T-shirt: 713 gallons

One pound of beef: 1,799 gallons

Note: Estimated water footprints are rounded up to the nearest gallon. Low-flow plumbing and high-efficiency appliances are reflected.

Sarson’s desire to control her water consumption blossomed during the drought of 2008 and grew so rapidly that she started her own water-use consulting business and has taught sustainability classes at City College. Her water-thrifty home — now a rental property — has become a destination for workshops about clamping down on water use without going broke.

“It’s not just about saving more water, but using your water in more efficient ways,” Sarson said.

She also tries to consider the larger water footprint of her shopping patterns, for instance by minimizing her meat purchases. But like most people, she remains uncertain about the secondary water demand that she creates.

It turns out that Sarson’s instincts were right. Meat — specifically beef — is among the biggest drains on water that people control through their daily decisions. The global average water footprint of beef is about 1,800 gallons per pound, almost entirely to grow feed, according to analysis by the Water Footprint Network, a leading analysis group in the Netherlands.

Strikingly, the average water footprint per calorie of beef can be 20 times larger than for grains and other basic foods. In industrialized countries, the average meat eater consumes about 1.6 times as much water as a vegetarian, according to a 2011 study. Beef also can require two or three times more water per pound than meat from pigs, goats and chickens.

Because of that, the water it takes to produce the typical American diet is more than the average per capita global water footprint for food, energy, home use, transportation and material goods, according to National Geographic, which has created an water footprint calculator on its website.

It says every dollar Americans spend on clothes or shoes “costs” about 23 gallons of water. Cotton is particularly thirsty; it takes roughly 700 gallons to make a cotton T-shirt. On any given day, Americans are “wearing” 4,000 to 6,000 gallons of water, said Sandra Postel, a “freshwater advocate” for National Geographic.

Then there’s the water demand connected to energy sources. The most obvious connection is for hydropower, but water also is consumed refining oil, cooling nuclear plants and growing products for biofuels. A gallon of gasoline, for example, requires 13 gallons of water by National Geographic’s calculations.

Such numbers are the result of attempts to account for every action that decreases the amount of clean water on the planet. Complex calculations for creating water footprints estimates the impact of humanity’s demand on the resource. It accounts for consumption of rainwater, along with use of surface water and groundwater, and water pollution, for instance by manufacturing processes. Even advocates warn that the methodology is imprecise, but they say it is good enough for helping people think about their choices.

“It’s really looking at the water that is embedded in all the goods and services that are keeping humanity afloat on a day-to-day basis,” Postel said.

Direct water use

Direct water use at home is estimated at just 5 percent of each person’s water footprint, but Postel and others maintain that element is significant because it’s directly tied to watersheds where consumers live and it’s the piece over which people have the most control. By conserving at home, people can influence the amount of water in local lakes and the amount of water drawn from places such as the Colorado River.

Residents across the West seem to have gotten that message, and many have slashed the amount of water they use around their homes and businesses.

Per capita deliveries dropped by 38 percent in Albuquerque, 31 percent in the Las Vegas area and 30 percent in Phoenix between 1990 and 2008, according to the Pacific Institute.

In San Diego County, potable water use is about 140 gallons per capita per day — down from 235 gallons in 1990. The result is that the region’s total water consumption today is less than it was in 1990 even though the population has swelled.

“San Diegans over the last few years have actually been doing a good job reducing their water consumption,” Tartre said. “But some of our recent research is showing that there is still more low-hanging fruit to be plucked. For single-family homes in San Diego, we could actually be using water 20 to 30 percent more efficiently.”

She said there still are lots of toilets and clothes washers that don’t meet current conservation standards. And, studies suggest leaks waste more than 10 percent of the water used in and around homes.

The net result is that San Diegans use far less water than people in places such as Dallas and Fresno, according to analysis by Brent Alspach, an environmental engineer in Carlsbad. But he found that San Diegans still use far more water per capita than most Australians, where daily consumption in major cities is 39 to 76 gallons per day, and residents of San Francisco, where per capita use is less than 100 gallons a day.

“No matter how good we think we are doing here in the U.S., we are still way behind Australia,” said Alspach, who linked conservation there to a prolonged drought during the last decade. “Until that happens (here), we won’t really get serious,” he said.

Global water trade

Serious attention to water footprint methodology creates all sorts of complex questions about the global nature of water, which is commonly used in one spot and shipped elsewhere in products.

The vast majority of the global flow of “virtual water” is in the form of farm goods, so that people in Europe indirectly affect water supplies in Brazil, and buyers of cotton from Central Asia are implicated in the draining of the Aral Sea for irrigation. One study calculated that about one-sixth of water problems in the world can be traced back to production for export.

Not surprisingly, the United States plays a major role both as a top importer of virtual water and a top exporter. Water policy experts question the impacts of hidden U.S. water demand in places such as Mexico, where farmers tap rivers and groundwater to grow crops that are destined for U.S. markets.

Virtual water exports inside Mexican fruits and vegetables grew about sevenfold between 1993 and 2009, according to Christopher Scott, a water researcher at the University of Arizona.

“The biggest challenge is the insatiable demand — much, but not all, of it north of the border in the U.S. or other non-Mexican markets — for the produce irrigated using groundwater that is being depleted in the process,” said Scott. “Aquifers, once depleted, may never come back in our lifetimes. This places local residents in these areas at considerable environmental and livelihood risk.”

While it doesn’t appear such dicey questions are close to being resolved at a national level, some companies and industries are analyzing their own water footprints both to improve public relations and find efficiencies.

The California Beef Council, for example, touts a recent academic research that said the amount of water needed to produce beef shrank by about 12 percent in recent decades. It challenged the figures from the Netherlands as overblown, saying efficiencies in animal and feed production drove down water consumption.

California-based Patagonia — a company known for its environmental ethic — has gone so far as to run an ad urging customers to “think twice before you buy anything” because it “comes with an environmental cost higher than its price.” The ad was part of the company’s larger water footprint initiative.

“It’s amazing, especially as you try to think about the impact that can have,” said Hans Cole at Patagonia’s Ventura headquarters. “If everyone on the planet is using that much water, where is it coming from? What impact is it having on rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs?”

Back at Stone Brewing, Sherwood figures each gallon of beer takes roughly 2.5 gallons of potable water to brew, not counting water taken up by barley and hops or other hidden demands.

At each stop in the brewing process, drains collect virtually every drop of water that isn’t being turned into beer and send it to a treatment system out back, where most of it is purified through a series of tanks and filters so it can be used again for washing and cooling.

But Sherwood said trimming water use doesn’t stop there. “No matter how efficient we are, if a person drinks a pint of our beer eventually they’re going to pee a pint,” he said. “Typically when you pee a pint, you flush it with eight pints of fresh water and all the conservation efforts are down the drain.”

That kind of thinking inspired waterless urinals at the bistro — another attempt to shrink the company’s water footprint.